Application of MBS (Multicast Broadcast Service) to various radio communication systems (e.g. 3GPP, WiMAX) is under study or is being started. Furthermore, there are demands for further increases in capacity such as streaming delivery concurrently with higher quality.
One technique to improve quality of MBS is application of coding technique. That is, as shown in FIG. 1, a first method is a method using low rate error correction code (FEC: Forward error correction) (see FIG. 1A) and a second method is a method using erasure correction code (ECC) as an outer code of FEC (see FIG. 1B). FIG. 1 shows a packet configuration example using systematic code. Here, R in FIG. 1 denotes a coding rate (where 0<R≦1).
Furthermore, application of ECC to an application layer or transport layer is conventionally under study and has already been standardized in DVB-H, 3GPP 26.346 MBMS, DVB-IPI (IPTV) or the like. Furthermore, application of ECC in a MAC layer is beginning to be studied aiming at obtaining an effect of reducing the amount of information and transmission delay in higher layers (e.g. see non-patent literature 1, patent literature 1 and patent literature 2). Various studies on codes used for ECC are under way, and for example, Reed-Solomon code, LDPC (Low-density parity-check code) code or the like can be applied.